Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  The hodgepodge of information started to acquire some order as she let herself become conscious of it. The Elaigar’s name was Korm. He had been Suan Uwin once, a High Commander, who had fallen into disgrace . . .

  She made some unexpected discoveries next.

  They seemed a stranger variation of the human race than she’d thought, these Elaigar! Their individual life span was short—perhaps too short to have let them develop the intricate skills of civilization if they’d wanted to. As they considered it, however, mental and physical toil were equally unworthy of an Elaigar. They prided themselves on being the masters of those who’d acquired advanced civilized skills and were putting that knowledge now to Elaigar use.

  She couldn’t make out clearly what Korm’s measurement of time came to in Federation units, but by normal human standards, he wasn’t more than middle-aged, if that. As an Elaigar, he was very old. That limitation was a race secret, kept concealed from serfs. Essu and the Tanvens assumed Sattarams and Otessans were two distinct Elaigar strains. But one was simply the mature adult, the other the juvenile form, which apparently made a rather abrupt transition presently to adulthood.

  The Alattas? A debased subrace. It had lost the ability to develop into Sattarams, and it worked like serfs because it had no serfs. Beyond that, the Alattas were enemies who might threaten the entire Elaigar campaign in the human Federation—

  Telzey broke off her review of Korm’s muddled angry mind content.

  Had there been some change in those fake Tolant impressions put out by Thrakell Dees? . . . Yes, there had! She came fully alert.

  “Thrakell?”

  No response. The impressions shifted slowly.

  “You might as well start talking,” she told him. “I know you’re there!”

  After a moment, his reply came sulkily. “You weren’t very friendly a while ago!”

  He didn’t seem far away. Telzey glanced along the gallery, then over at the door through which she’d come out on it. Behind the door, a passage ran parallel to the gallery. Thrakell Dees probably was there.

  She said, “I didn’t think it was friendly of you either to try to get to my mind when you thought I might be too busy to notice! If we’re going to work together, there can’t be any more tricks like that.”

  A lengthy pause. The screening alien patterns blurred, reformed, blurred again.

  “Where did you send the Tolant?” Thrakell Dees asked suddenly.

  “He’s getting something for me.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  This time it was Telzey who didn’t reply. Stalling, she thought. Her skin began to prickle. What was he up to?

  She glanced uneasily up and down the gallery. He wasn’t there. But—Her breath caught softly.

  It was as if she’d blinked away a blur on her vision.

  She took Essu’s gun from her jacket pocket, turned, pointed the gun toward the gallery wall on her right.

  And there Thrakell Dees, moving very quietly toward her, barely twenty feet away, came to an abrupt halt, eyes widening in consternation.

  “Yes, I see you now!” Telzey said between her teeth, cheeks hot with anger. “I know that not-there trick! And it won’t work on me when I suspect it’s being used.”

  Thrakell moistened his lips. He was a bony man of less than average height, who might be forty years of age. He wore shirt and trousers of mottled brown shades, a round white belt encircling his waist in two tight loops. He had small intent blue eyes, set deep under thick brows, and a high bulging forehead. His long hair was pulled sharply to the back of his head and tied there. A ragged beard framed the lower face.

  “No need to point the gun at me,” he said. He smiled, showing bad teeth. “I’m afraid I was trying to impress you with my abilities. I admit it was a thoughtless thing to do.”

  Telzey didn’t lower the gun. She felt quite certain there’d been nothing thoughtless about that stealthy approach. He’d had a purpose; and whatever it had been, it wasn’t simply to impress her with his abilities.

  “Thrakell,” she said, “just keep your hands in sight and sit down over there by the balustrade. You can help me watch the hall while I watch you. There’re some things I want you to tell me about—but better not do anything at all to make me nervous before Essu gets back!”

  He shrugged and complied. When he was settled on the floor to Telzey’s satisfaction, she laid the gun down before her. Thrakell might be useful, but he was going to take watching, at least until she knew more about him.

  He seemed anxious to make amends, answering her questions promptly and refraining from asking questions himself after she’d told him once there was no time for that now.

  The picture she got of the Elaigar circuit was rather startling. What the Service was confronted with on Tinokti was a huge and virtually invisible fortress. The circuit had no official existence; there never had been a record of it in Tongi Phon files. Its individual sections were scattered about the planet, most of them buried among thousands of sections of other circuits, outwardly indistinguishable from them. If a section did happen to be identified and its force screens were overpowered, which could be no simple matter in populated areas, it would be cut automatically out of the circuit from a central control section, leaving searchers no farther than before. The control section itself lay deep underground. They’d have to start digging up Tinokti to locate it.

  Then there was a device called the Vingarran, connected with the control section. Telzey had found impressions of it in the material drawn from Korm’s mind. Korm knew how the Vingarran was used and hadn’t been interested in knowing more. Thrakell couldn’t add much. It was a development of alien technology, constructed by the Elaigar’s serf scientists. It was like a superportal with a minimum range which made it unusable within the limited extent of a planet. Its original purpose might have been to provide interplanetary transportation. The Elaigar used it to connect the Tinokti circuit with spaceships at the fringes of the system. They came and went customarily by that method, though there were a number of portal exits to the planetary surface. They were in no way trapped here by the Service’s investment of Tinokti.

  “How could a circuit like that get set up in the first place?” Telzey asked.

  Thrakell bared his teeth in an unpleasant grimace.

  “Phons of the Institute planned it and had it done. Who else could have arranged it secretly?”

  “Why did they do it?”

  He shrugged. “It was their private kingdom. Whoever was brought into it, as I was one day, became their slave. Escape was impossible. Our Phon lords were responsible to no one and did as they pleased—until the Elaigar came. Then they were no more than their slaves and died with them.”

  Telzey reflected. “You’ve been able to tap Elaigar minds without getting caught at it?” she asked.

  “I’ve done it on occasion,” Thrakell said, “but I haven’t tried it for some time. I made a nearly disastrous slip with a relatively inexperienced Otessan, and decided to discontinue the practice. An Elaigar mind is always dangerous—the creatures are suspicious of one another and alert for attempted probes and controls. Instead I maintain an information network of unshielded serfs. I can pick up almost anything I want to know from one or the other of them, without running risks.” He added, “Of course, old Korm can be probed rather safely, as I imagine you discovered.”

  “Yes, I did,” Telzey said. “Then you’ve never tried to control one of them?”

  Thrakell looked startled. “That would be most inadvisable!”

  It might be. Telzey said, “By our standards, Korm isn’t really old, is he?”

  “Not at all!” Thrakell Dees seemed amused. “Twenty-four Federation years, at most.”

  “They don’t live any longer than that?” Telzey said.

  “Few live even that long! One recurring satisfaction I’ve had here is to watch my enemies go lumbering down to death, one after the other, these past six years. Stiltik, at seventeen, is in h
er prime. Boragost, now twenty, is past his. And Korm exists only as an object lesson.”

  Telzey had seen that part vividly in Korm’s jumbled recalls. Sattarams, male or female, weren’t expected to outlive their vigor. When they began to weaken noticeably, they challenged younger and stronger Sattarams and died fighting. Those who appeared hesitant about it were taken to see Korm. He’d held back too long on issuing his final challenge, and had been shut away, left to deteriorate, his condition a warning to others who risked falling into the same error.

  She learned that the Elaigar changed from the Otessan form to the adult one in their fourteenth year. That sudden drastic metamorphosis was also a racial secret. Otessans approaching the point left the circuit; those who returned as Sattarams weren’t recognized by the serfs.

  Thrakell could add nothing to the information about the Alattas Telzey already had gathered. He knew Alatta spies had been captured in the circuit before this; they’d died by torture or in ritual combat with Sattaram leaders. There was a deadly enmity between the two obviously related strains.

  On the subject of the location of the Elaigar home territories, he could offer only that they must be several months’ travel from the Hub clusters. And Korm evidently knew no more. Space navigation was serf work, its details below an Elaigar’s notice.

  “Have they caught the three Alattas who got away from Stiltik yet?” Telzey asked.

  There Thrakell was informed. He’d been listening around among his mental contacts before following Telzey to the hospital area. The three still had been at large at that time, and there seemed to be no immediate prospect of catching up with them. They’d proved to be expert portal technicians who’d sealed off sizable circuit areas by distorting portal patterns and substituting their own. Stiltik’s portal specialists hadn’t been able to handle the problem. The armed party sent after the three was equipped with copies of a key pack taken from Tscharen but had no better luck. The matter wasn’t being discussed, and Thrakell Dees suspected not all of the hunters had returned.

  “Stiltik would very much like to be able to announce that she’s rounded up the infiltrators,” he said. “It would add to her prestige which is high at present.”

  “Apparently Stiltik and Boragost—the Suan Uwin—don’t get along very well?” Telzey said.

  He laughed. “One of them will kill the other! Stiltik doesn’t intend to wait much longer to become senior Suan Uwin. and she’s generally rated now as the deadliest fighter in the circuit. The Elaigar make few of our nice distinctions between the sexes.” Boragost’s qualities as a leader, it appeared, were in question. Stiltik had been pushing for a unified drive to clear the Alattas out of the Federation. She’d gained a large following. Boragost blocked the move, on the grounds that a major operation of the kind couldn’t be carried out without alerting the Federation’s humans to the presence of aliens. And now Boragost had committed a blunder which might have accomplished just that. “You know what dagens are?” Thrakell asked.

  “Yes. The mind hounds. I saw Stiltik’s when they caught me.”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “Horrible creatures! Fortunately, there’re only three in the circuit at present because few Elaigar are capable of controlling them. A short while ago, Boragost fumbled a dagen kill outside the circuit.”

  Telzey nodded. “Four Phons in the Institute. That wasn’t planned then?”

  “Far from it! Only one of the Phons was to die, and that neither in the Institute nor in the presence of witnesses. But Boragost failed to verify the victim’s exact whereabouts at the moment he released the mind hound, and the mind hound, of course, went where the Phon was. When it found him among others, it killed them, too. Stiltik’s followers claim that was what brought the Psychology Service to Tinokti.”

  “It was,” Telzey said. “How will they settle it?”

  “Almost certainly through Stiltik’s challenge to Boragost. The other high-ranking Sattarams in the Hub have been coming in with their staffs through the Vingarran Gate throughout the week. They’ll decide whether Boragost’s conduct under their codes entitles Stiltik to challenge. If it does, he must accept. If it doesn’t, she’ll be deprived of rank and returned to their home territories. The codes these creatures bind themselves by are iron rules. It’s the only way they have to avoid major butcheries among the factions.”

  Telzey was silent a moment, blinking reflectively at him.

  “Thrakell,” she said, “when we met, you told me you were the last human left alive in the circuit.”

  His eyes went wary. “That’s right.”

  “There’s been someone besides us with a human mind in this section for some little while now,” Telzey told him. “The name is Neto. Neto Nayne-Mel.”

  VII

  Thrakell Dees said quickly, “Have nothing to do with that creature! She’s dangerously unbalanced! I didn’t tell you about her because I was afraid you might think of letting her join us.”

  “I am letting her join us.” Telzey said.

  Thrakell shook his head violently. “I advise you strongly against it! Neto Nayne-Mel is unpredictable. I know that she’s ambushed and killed two Elaigar. She could endanger us all with her hatreds!”

  Telzey said, “I understand she was a servant of the Elaigar in the circuit for a couple of years before she managed to get away from them. I suppose that might leave someone a little unbalanced. She’s got something for me. I told her to bring it here to the gallery.”

  Thrakell grimaced nervously. “Neto’s threatened to shoot me if she finds me within two hundred yards of her!”

  “Well. Thrakell,” Telzey said, “she may have caught you trying to sneak up on her, like I did. But that won’t count now. We’re going to need one another’s help to get out. Neto understands that.”

  Thrakell argued no further. He still looked quite upset, due in part perhaps to the fact that there’d been a mental exchange between Neto and Telzey of which he’d remained unaware.

  A human being who was to stay alive and at large for any length of time in the Elaigar circuit would need either an unreasonable amount of luck or rather special qualities. Thrakell. along with the ability to project a negation of his physical presence, had mental camouflage, and xernotelepathy which enabled him to draw information from unsuspecting alien mentalities around him.

  Neto was otherwise equipped. Her mind didn’t shield itself, but its patterns could be perceived only by a degree of psi sensitivity which Thrakell Dees lacked, and the Elaigar evidently also lacked. She’d devised a form of physical concealment almost as effective as Thrakell’s. Her other resources were quick physical reactions and a natural accuracy with a gun which she’d discovered after escaping from her masters. She’d killed four Elaigar since then, not two. Her experiences had, in fact, left her somewhat unbalanced, but not in a way Telzey felt at all concerned about.

  A few minutes later, Neto stepped out suddenly on the gallery a hundred feet away and started toward them. The figure they saw was that of a Fossily mechanic, one of the serf people in the circuit—a body of slim human type enclosed by a fitted yellow coverall which left only the face exposed. The face was a mask of vivid black and yellow lines. Neto was almost within speaking distance before the human features concealed by the Fossily face pattern began to be discernible.

  That was the disguise Neto had adopted for herself. Fossily mechanics, with their tool kits hung knapsackwise behind their shoulders, were employed almost everywhere in the circuit and drew no attention in chance encounters. Moreover, they had a species odor profoundly offensive to Elaigar nostrils. Their coverall suits were chemically impregnated to hide it; and the resulting sour but tolerable smell also covered the human scent. A second yellow tool bag swung by its straps from Neto’s gloved left hand. In it was a Fossily suit for Telzey, and black and yellow face paint.

  Essu returned not long afterwards. Telzey touched his mind as he appeared in the portal down in the great hall, and knew he’d carried out his assignment. A pack
of circuit diagram maps was concealed under his uniform jacket. He hadn’t let himself be seen.

  He joined them on the gallery, blandly accepting the presence of two wild humans and the fact that Telzey and Neto were disguised as Fossily mechanics. Telzey looked at Thrakell Dees.

  Thrakell could be a valuable confederate. Could be. She wasn’t sure what else he might be. Neto suspected he was a murderer, that he’d done away with other circuit survivors. There was no proof of it, but Telzey hadn’t taken her attention off him since she’d caught him stalking her in his uncanny manner on the gallery, and there’d been an occasional shimmer of human thought through the cover pattern, which he’d changed meanwhile to that of a Fossily mechanic. She’d made out nothing clearly, but what she seemed to sense at those moments hadn’t reduced her uneasiness about Thrakell.

  “Thrakell,” she said, “before we get down to business, I’m giving you a choice.”

  He frowned. “A choice?”

  “Yes. What I’d like you to do is to give up that Fossily cover and open your screens for a minute, so I can see what you’re thinking. That would be simplest.”

  Thrakell shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  Neto chuckled softly.

  “Oh, you understand,” Telzey said. “You wanted to come along when I try to get out of the circuit, so you are coming along. But we didn’t get off to a good start, and I don’t feel I can take you on trust now. You could prove I can by letting me look at your mind. Just the surface stuff—I want to know what made you decide to contact me, that’s all.”

  Thrakell’s small eyes glittered with angry apprehension. But his voice was even. “What if I refuse?”

  “Then Essu will take your weapons and circuit key pack.”

  Thrakell looked shocked. “That’s completely unfair! If we became separated, I’d be confined to whatever section I happened to be in. I’d be helpless!”